Insiyah Vahanvaty is a socio-political writer, commentator and scholar. She is the author of The Fearless Judge: The Life and Times of Justice A. M. Ahmadi and co-authors a fortnightly column for the Hindustan Times on constitutional debates and political life.
There was a time when a rupture in moral language seemed capable of reshaping international politics.
When Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy student protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989, the violence did more than shock the world. It suggested that even the world powers, particularly United States had limits to what it would tolerate from even its most strategically important partners.
And this was no ordinary alignment. It was a tenuous relationship forged painstakingly by Washington over many years. It had begun in secrecy, engineered through Henry Kissinger’s back-channel diplomacy and culminating in Richard Nixon’s historic secret visit to Beijing. This was a watershed moment that forever reconfigured Cold War alignments. It was neither easy nor casual. And so, it was not to be carelessly discarded. But even such a relationship, carefully cultivated over decades, ultimately found itself unable to stomach the scale of the state violence before it.
Washington imposed sanctions, suspended military cooperation and froze high-level engagement. Europe followed with arms embargoes. Beijing became, if only temporarily, a pariah. The relationships eventually recovered. But the message was clear: there was a political price to be paid for what was widely regarded as morally indefensible.
But we live in a different world today.
The destruction of Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been documented in extraordinary detail. United Nations agencies, commissions of inquiry, humanitarian organisations and legal scholars have produced an archive of evidence that grows by the week. These reports have raised allegations ranging from war crimes to crimes against humanity, and some United Nations-appointed experts have warned that the cumulative pattern of conduct may meet the threshold of genocide under international law. Activists, academics and policy experts have expressed moral outrage at the findings.
Yet the United States continues to arm, finance and diplomatically shield Israel. Unlike China, it cannot simply break from Israel, because the relationship is embedded in its own strategic, military and political architecture —one in which the author argues it is not just a partner, but an accomplice.
It is in this context that recent findings from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by Indian jurist Justice S. Muralidhar, must be understood. The Commission’s findings do not speak in abstractions. They describe children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck; the destruction of hospitals and schools; starvation as a method of warfare; and the systematic dismantling of the spaces in which childhood is possible. It documents testimony attributed to an Israel Defense Forces soldier that has circulated widely: “(Using drones in Gaza) feels like a game. You can sit in some basement of a house, safe with your helmet off, scratching your balls, half-dressed and kill Palestinians.” It also reports that more than 20,000 children have been killed and 44,000 injured. The word genocide is no longer abstract.
The question is no longer whether evidence exists. It plainly does. What matters now is what any of it is capable of changing.
In today’s world, no number of reports can, by themselves, enforce political consequences. The United Nations continues to produce detailed legal and moral documentation. The Security Council’s authority has always depended upon the consent of its most powerful members, especially the United States, whose political and military alignment often determines the limits of institutional response. It can record, classify and warn, but it cannot compel those with veto power or strategic dominance to act or to refrain from acting.
This is why the growing list of international responses, while politically significant, has not produced decisive consequences. A number of states, including Spain, Ireland, Norway and Slovenia, have recently recognised Palestinian statehood after long periods of hesitation. South Africa has brought proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice over alleged breaches of the Genocide Convention of 1948. Some European states have imposed restrictions on arms transfers to Israel, and a number of countries in Latin America have either downgraded or suspended diplomatic relations. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants against Israeli political and military leaders. Some governments and legal experts have characterised Israel’s conduct in Gaza as amounting to genocide, while Israel rejects that characterization.
Yet, Israel does not stand isolated. Today, the United States still speaks the language of norms, rules and accountability. But, the author contends, in its alignment with Israel, this language has become meaningless.
For decades, the “rules-based order” presented itself as an alternative to the logic of raw power. Built in the aftermath of the Second World War, it promised a traumatised world that states would increasingly be governed not simply by military strength or geopolitical power, but by shared rules, international institutions and legal restraint. Sovereignty, human rights, proportionality and humanitarian law all gained legitimacy through this order. The stated aim was to bind power to shared standards so that violence could be named, limited and, where necessary, collectively punished.
But that system was always dependent on an unwritten rule: that the major powers, too, would accept constraints when demanded by the system. Time and again, the premise has failed.
And that makes the answer to the question of why the United States sanctioned China in 1989 but refuses to distance itself from Israel today painfully sobering. Because after the Cold War, American power rested not only on military supremacy, but on legitimacy. The “rules-based order” became part of its geopolitical architecture. Tiananmen was a moral shock that threatened that narrative. Washington needed to demonstrate that the system had force.
Today, the irony is stark.
The United States has become so deeply invested in Israel that enforcing the very order it built would now require constraining itself.
And so the question has changed. It is not simply about inconsistency, but about whether the system still has any teeth when it turns to its own principal stakeholder, the state that built it. And if the rules-based order cannot meaningfully constrain its architect, if enforcement depends on power instead of principle, then what exactly remains of it? What distinguishes it from earlier systems that openly bowed to might?
And if that is truly the case, the question is no longer whether the order is under strain. It is something more frightening: What does the modern world look like when that order has collapsed?
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